Launching a comedy RPG feels like one of the bravest things you can do in video games. In general, there just isn’t much in the way of full-on comedy video games out there. But the few that exist that people know about are considered certified classics. If I tell you that I’m going to play a comedy RPG, your first thoughts will probably be Earthbound and Undertale, which are some of the most treasured games out there. Like it or not, those are the games that you will be compared to if you enter this space, especially with 16-bit type graphics as well.
Enter: Athenian Rhapsody. This was a crowdfunded game created to help fill the void in this genre. It clearly loves those classics and wants to put its own spin on this genre with even weirder hijinx and a surprisingly difficult battle system. Sadly, it just didn’t do it for me, in almost any capacity.
Funny Until It’s Not
Your goal in Athenian Rhapsosdy is to explore Athens and create a rhapsody based on your experiences, which can change depending on how you play the game. The story ends up kind of feeling like a sitcom, where some of the characters stay the same, but each episode is pretty much a stand-alone experience that isn’t super connected. There really isn’t much of a story here.
Beyond anything else, Athenian Rhapsody is trying to be funny. And through my first hour or so with the game, I was sold that they had that on lockdown. The game throws a lot of absurdist humor at you, and I kept being thrown off guard by it in ways that made me laugh. Very early on, the game gives you a personality quiz. The questions start normal, then get just a little weirder, and then suddenly it asks you what finger you would cut off if you had to chop one off. I laughed out loud at this. There are several more moments like this where the game surprised me by how over the top it is and penetrated my humor shield for massive damage.
Some of the early characters I came across also aided this humor, like a pretty evil devil who also has communication problems with his wife. When you end up fighting this demon, the fight can turn into a crazy basketball mini game. That is how random and funny this game can be.
But after a while, the bits just kind of got old. I think over time, the game just stopped surprising me with its humor. Athenian Rhapsody wants to be weird and random, but over time, that feels like that is all it has got. Once the shock factor goes away, the humor slowly starts to slip away more and more as well. For example, some of the very weird and funny music and sound effects in the game that made me laugh early on suddenly become old hat as they keep getting re-used.
The same goes for a few of the punchlines, like one where a character tells you that you have more work to do with befriending creatures in a biome. When you check in and he realizes that you haven’t done everything that you can do in that area, he pauses for an extended amount of time and then tells you that “obviously you aren’t freaking done!” The first time this happened, I chuckled. The second time it happened, I did not. And I definitely didn’t laugh the third, fourth, and fifth times, either. Simply, the more I played Athenian Rhapsody, the more sick I got of pretty much all of the humor, which is kind of the point of the game.
Fight Or Befriend…How About Neither?
It is also possible that I stopped finding the game as funny as I got increasingly sick of the battle system. Athenian Rhapsody makes one decision after another with its fights that I simply did not understand.
Much like the humor, it felt fine enough at first. The battle system is turn based, with action elements. In the attack stage, you simply want to hit attack when a bar fills up. Easy enough. When your opponent attacks, you suddenly feel like you are in a Mega Man/Bullet Hell game, except you (usually) can’t jump or do anything special. Through that first hour of the game, I was happy to play something a little different here. But as the game goes on, it gets increasingly tricky, and some bosses are shockingly hard. I like challenging action games, but Athenian Rhapsody isn’t the kind of game where it is really enjoyable to overcome that challenge. You are just playing as a very normal kid, and you have no cool abilities when dodging, so it just feels weirdly dull even though you have dozens of enemy attacks coming at you at once.
The game being fully separated into phases kind of hurts it as well. The thing that makes bullet hell type games fun to me is dodging and waiting to find an opening to do your own attack. Since the game is divided into phases, that does not happen here. You are only working on avoiding attacks in the defensive stage, and it gets old.
Creating a very difficult combat system within a comedy RPG is a super strange decision. The developers seem to know this, so whenever you die, the game advertises its easy mode to you every single time. Unfortunately, I felt like it took things a bit too far and made it no challenge at all outside of 1 or 2 bosses. The mechanics of the battle system probably were not fun enough for me to enjoy them for as long as I played this game anyway, but a more balanced difficulty setting might have helped a little bit.
The combat does try to bring in some of the zaniness with its friend system. Essentially, you can befriend enemies instead of killing them. Pretty much all of the big bosses in the game can also be befriended and then come with you on your journey as well. For example, if you are fighting a dog, you might come across dialogue options that let you pet the dog, bark at the dog, or play fetch with the dog (I’m making this scenario up, plenty of them get really weird as you might expect). Usually, only one or two of those options will build the friendship meter, and then one or two will not do anything. And of course, the game likes to surprise you with these things. In my fictional scenario, I wouldn’t be shocked if “bark” was the right answer even though it seems like the least likely way to befriend a dog. So befriending enemies just becomes a guessing game, which is really random and annoying.
You also don’t gain any EXP when you befriend enemies, which ties into the plot of the game, where the EXP system is essentially ruining the world. This is great and all, but it is super unrewarding to befriend enemies. You do gain companions with this system, but you can only take one at a time with you anyway. I spent a lot of time befriending enemies, because I wanted to hopefully have a “good” ending, and I mostly regretted it, as it is an annoying way to approach the battle system, and makes the game harder since you aren’t leveling up the more you do it. You need that HP from leveling up to help deal with the amount of damage you will take in most of the encounters in the game.
Listen To The Rhapsody About How I Never Have To Play This Game Again
If I wasn’t aware of how short Athenian Rhapsody was, I don’t think I would have ever finished it. I realized that I truly did not like it after 2-3 hours, and I slowly forced my way to finish for another 3+ hours. I’m sure there is an audience for this game. It actually has really strong reviews on OpenCritic and is “very positive” on Steam. But that audience is certainly not me. Athenian Rhapsody failed to deliver on its two biggest features, which caused a painful playthrough that I could not wait to end.
Because of its elements of choice, Athenian Rhapsody advertises itself as a very replayable game, but even for those who like the game, I’d be surprised if many truly want to run it back with the gameplay mechanics where they are in particular. I can assure you that I personally will never find out what happens in a true pacifist run, and I am extremely at peace with that.
Score: 5.5/10
Big Nerd Gaming 
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